


fragile things

by lyres



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Bird Attacks, Canon-Typical Bird Symbolism, Complicated Relationships, Disclaimer: Tholomyès appears briefly in this in order to be physically injured, Familiars, Gen, Père Mabeuf: the Witchy Father Figure we deserve, Witches, memory spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23899195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyres/pseuds/lyres
Summary: Éponine couldn't move a muscle. Cosette, incomprehensibly, smiled. “Good morning, thief.”“What do you want?”“To finish our transaction.” Slowly, as if not to spook her, Cosette raised her right hand, from which dangled a linen satchel. “I'm sorry for the delay; you didn't seem receptive to negotiating the other night. May I come in?”(Éponine needs to finish a spell, Cosette's garden is the richest magical resource in France, and memory is a complicated thing.)
Relationships: Cosette Fauchelevent & Éponine Thénardier
Comments: 16
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Eight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obi4KCh6eHQ) by Sleeping at Last, because I am a parody of myself. This time the song really does fit the story quite neatly, though, so it's not even just a force of habit.

“Finding what you're looking for?”

A flock of birds, startled by the noise, fled from a nearby rose bush.

The ghost who was stealing from Cosette's garden didn't freeze, or start, or turn around. With no delay, they began to run, and Cosette jumped to cut them off at the garden gate.

“Stop it,” she hissed, exasperated, as the shadowy figure struggled against her grip. “Christ, won't you – stop this – _there_.”

The ghost had gone limp, their shoulders slumping like a puppet with cut strings.

Cosette exhaled, fingers still a vice around the thief's arms. “Now. If you'll be so good as to tell me why you've been trespassing here every night for a week?”

Close as they were, she could hear the thief breathing, quick and low. They were perfectly obscured, a large, dark cloak draped around a small figure whose face was turned away, but beneath Cosette's hands, a pulse fluttered like a hummingbird's.

The thief – not a ghost, unfortunately; ghosts famously did not have such lively pulses – twisted in her arms, and then a hand, cold and clammy, was pressed to Cosette's forehead and showered powder across her eyes. Cosette felt the momentary dizziness of a beginning spell, but nothing took hold, and the thief, who, in the desperate hope of escaping by magical means, had revealed their face, stared at her with wide eyes.

“I know,” whispered Cosette. “Strong for a protective charm, isn't it? I do my best.”

She wanted to keep the thief there. If someone stole from her garden, they knew where to steal from, which was concerning. It was one thing to be well-known under a pseudonym for one's business in enchanted objects, quite another to have led a customer with bad intentions to one's home. She wanted to know how they'd known what to look for; how they'd found her; what they wanted desperately enough put what must have been weeks of preparation into, yet couldn't pay the price for.

Cosette looked at the thief's face, and the understanding washed suddenly over her that she wouldn't learn anything tonight. It only took a moment – round, brown eyes, like something half-remembered – and she knew, with quiet certainty, that there wasn't a drop of truth to be drawn from them.

She drew her hands away. Her jaw set, she stepped back, and jerked her head roughly in the direction of the gate behind them.

The thief stared at her. When they opened their mouth to speak, Cosette whispered, “ _Out_.”

Quiet as a spectre, the thief disappeared into the night. Cosette locked the garden gate with shaking hands, tiptoed into the house, cleaned her bare feet – she'd run out too fast, with barely a thought for anything but quietness – and curled up in bed.

There were embers dying in her fireplace. Her father insisted it be lit in the evenings, central heating notwithstanding; the Ice Saints were coming on with frosty nights, and he would use that as justification until long after the Saints' days had gone.

Beneath her covers, Cosette trembled until she fell asleep.

* * *

No one, no matter how careful, could follow Éponine through the city without her knowing. It required no magic: experience had done that work for her, experience in following undetected, experience in feeling some spat-out spell or other on her heels, tracing her movements through Paris and hanging on to the hem of her skirt like a bur.

She wasn't being followed tonight, and took turns and bends to shake something off nonetheless. A feeling, perhaps: a look, a gesture, the recognition of someone else's eyes.

Éponine had seen her before, of course. She'd caught glances of her at the market and traced her moving silhouette all the way to Rue Plumet, but she'd not looked into those eyes in – what was it, now? Fourteen years? Fifteen?

The feeling remained, no matter how many turns she took.

When Éponine let herself in, the old man's house was dark save for the small light warming the hallway. He'd said too many times that they were guests here, and welcome to make themselves as much at home as they possibly could. Éponine hadn't once found the right way of responding that they'd never learned the knack of feeling at home anywhere else, and were unlikely to catch up now.

On the soft carpet, Éponine walked quietly as a ghost, and carried her shoes and cloak under her arm into the library.

Azelma lay in the cot, curled up like a cat. She had her back turned to the door, but she was awake; Éponine locked the door and crawled in beside her.

“We're in trouble,” she whispered. Azelma snorted, and Éponine said, quietly, “New trouble.”

“Get caught?”

“Do you remember her?” asked Éponine. Her head was heavy. She rested her forehead against the back of her sister's neck, a single point of warmth, and closed her eyes. “Do you remember what she looked like?”

“The Lark?”

Éponine hadn't yet found out where the nickname came from. The first time she went to find her at the market, having heard of a good place to nick rare warding charms from, she'd suspected nothing at all, and had stood thunder-bolted to the ground in recognition when she'd caught sight of the stall. The Lark: there was no witch in Paris worth their salt who hadn't bought from her. Enchanted objects and ingredients only, of course; she wasn't the sort to sully herself with spells.

“She had a dip in her chin,” said Azelma. “And dimples, when she spoke. We used to tease her for it.”

“She caught me tonight,” Éponine whispered. “I thought she was going to –” What, really? Call for help; expose her? Who was with her, anyway, in that fortress of a house, ringed by the most potent magical garden in France and protective charms that were almost enough to keep even the birds out? “She just let me go. I saw her, and she had no idea who I was. She didn't recognise me at all.”

“Maybe someone spelled her.” Azelma shrugged. She moved, then, to turn around, and her perpetually sceptical face had gained another trace of worry. “That's good, isn't it? Wouldn't we be fucked if she did remember us?”

“Language,” said Éponine. “Yeah, I – I suppose we would be.”

“So why's that trouble?”

Éponine sighed. She turned, and pressed her face into the pillow in muted frustration.

Cosette had looked different – of course she had – but it hadn't been age that had made her, for a moment, look like a stranger: it had been the lack of fear in her eyes. Perhaps it was only a child's memory, blurry and distorted by the nightmares that had pulled at it from all sides, but Éponine couldn't remember having seen Cosette unafraid.

She would have been afraid, Éponine thought, if she'd recognised the thief in her garden for who she was. Shame had burned memories into Éponine's mind, memories of Cosette's maroon hair, filthy with dust and grime, memories of the fear in her eyes, dulled, in time, by the horrifying reality of feeling little else – and Cosette, in some inhuman feat of mental strength or coincidental mercy, had forgotten them.

On a practical level, there was no saying whether Cosette might remember her if they crossed paths again: that alone was enough to keep Éponine from the garden for good, and then there were the charms protecting it as well, undone by weeks of careful work (delegated to familiars, admittedly, but work nonetheless) that was now all in vain as Cosette doubtlessly renewed them.

Éponine wanted to slap herself.

“Because,” she said, voice muffled by the cushion, “I didn't get what I needed before she caught me.”

Her misery earned no more sympathy than a patronising pat on the head. “I stand corrected,” said Azelma. “We're fucked no matter what.”

* * *

As a rule, Cosette made sure to schedule her visits with Musichetta on the same days as the most bothersome chores she could imagine. It was a matter of trade, seeing her, but a treat in equal measure.

“I smell saffron,” noted Cosette, accepting the coffee mug that was unceremoniously pressed into her hands. Musichetta rolled her eyes.

“You know, I love Joly, I'd die for him, and so on, but he's having too much fun in the kitchen for his own good. We're three people in this apartment and he bakes for ten. I can't finish a whole cake by myself on my best days.”

“Oh, no, what _are_ you going to do. If _only_ you knew someone with contacts at all local food banks and a notorious sweet tooth.”

“Shut up. Business first, gifts of cakes and buns later. What did you bring me?”

Cosette had brought payment. Musichetta had one foot tangled in everyone's strings of fate at any given moment, and she was happy to unravel and follow some of them, given the right incentive: bracelets woven through with protective charms; oddities from Cosette's cabinet; the latest harvest of rosebuds. Today's token was rarer than usual, and, Cosette flattered herself, much more clever.

“Impossible to lose,” she said, holding up a braided straw key-chain. “Your boyfriend will never lock himself out again. He could forget this thing in a bank vault and it'd follow him around like a murder doll.”

“Good God.”

“Oh, you know, just a night's work.” It wasn't an exaggeration: she'd worked on the enchantment into the small hours of the morning, letting the charm toe the fine line between useful and ominous. The difference between an enchanted and a cursed object was, after all, rather a question of one's point of view. Cosette smiled. “You're welcome.”

“Any news on the dirtbag I'm tracing?”

“We–ell,” said Cosette, and wrapped fingers around her coffee mug. “Sort of, but I was actually going to bother you with something different today.”

The difficult thing about asking favours of Musichetta was that she always Knew. If you were running headfirst into a bad decision, she had a Hunch, and didn't shy away from indicating her disapproval. Cosette had come here prepared for this. The look Musichetta gave her still stung.

“No, look, the thing is, they owe me,” she rushed to explain. “This is about some – some _very_ unfinished business, I mean, I can't just let people break into my garden and then not follow up. What kind of message would that send? And anyway, I saved Bossuet's _life_ –”

“Perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration?”

“You don't know that! His life might depend on him having his keys on him at some point. Ah, Chetta.” Cosette hid her face in her hands. “Please help me with this. I can't tell you why it matters, and yes, I'm aware that this looks like I'm just running away from the dirtbag situation, and I know it's potentially really stupid. Please help me find my thief.”

“Hey.” Musichetta's voice softened. “Cosette, I'm not judging. It's a little worrying, I won't lie, but you're an adult.”

“Tell that to my dad.”

“He's still got no idea about any of this, does he?”

“You know what the worst thing is?” Cosette looked up. “He'd understand. He wouldn't want me to let you track down the dirtbag, and I don't know if he'd try to stop me, but he'd understand why I _want_ to. He'd be kind about it.” She shivered. “I don't think understanding and kindness have a place in this.”

“I agree.” Chetta paused, and put a hand to Cosette's forearm. “Look, when the dirtbag's time comes, I'll be here. And whatever this other thing is, please be careful about it. That's all I ask. This isn't – clairvoyance doesn't come with 'Best Stop Here' labels; I can't actually see what's going to happen. Don't allow me to let a friend walk right into an open knife.”

Cosette chided herself, in silence, for her genuine, if brief, feeling of surprise. Of course Chetta cared; she was a generous and caring person, but Cosette had missed, by some trick, the awareness that they'd long gone past being business partners only. “I promise,” she said softly. She slipped a hand into her pocket, fingers wrapping around the strip of cloth she'd torn off the thief's cloak as she'd let them run. “Very solemnly.”

Musichetta hid a smile behind her coffee mug. “Well, then,” she said. “Let's see what you have.”

* * *

The old man's house was not a home, but it made a painful effort to be. Éponine never stopped being aware of it. At night, their bed was warm; in the morning, there was a cupboard for just their own breakfast supplies. It was a bizarre thing to be given in exchange for some help in the garden, the immeasurable gift of security, and in consequence, they accepted it in fragments, locking the library door at night, never shifting items out of place, not laying a finger on the books, and wrapping Éponine's attempts at spellmaking soundly away whenever they both left the house.

It was a sort of magical sympathy – there was no other explanation for it. The old man didn't meddle with spells, but his house was covered in charms, and he'd known magic, Éponine assumed, when he'd seen it in her. Éponine couldn't bring herself to mind the oddness of Mabeuf's motivations. People had found far worse reasons to be kind to them in the past.

Mabeuf's front yard, fenced and excessively charming, had a bird feeder that had ceased to need re-stocking some time around mid-April, when spring had arrived with fanfares and next to no prior warning. Éponine went out, nonetheless, each morning, and filled it up with whatever seeds Mabeuf kept around. This morning, when she turned from the front door to find Cosette waiting behind the fence, handfuls of sunflower seeds poured with a pretty sound to the ground.

Her first thought, Éponine was ashamed to note, was that she'd have to persuade Azelma to leave behind the only place that had ever made an attempt to become a home to them.

Éponine couldn't move a muscle. Cosette, incomprehensibly, smiled. “Good morning, thief.”

“What do you want?”

“To finish our transaction.” Slowly, as if not to spook her, Cosette raised her right hand, from which dangled a linen satchel. “I'm sorry for the delay; you didn't seem receptive to negotiating the other night. May I come in?”

“No.”

“Ah.” Cosette opened the satchel, elaborately, making sure Éponine could see every last herb and flower folded inside, and raised her eyebrows. “I'll just leave and take these with me, then.”

 _Damn_.

Éponine walked slowly down the gravel path. She opened the gate of the fence; Cosette took two steps back.

“Let me ask again,” said Éponine calmly. She glanced back at the bird feeder. “What is it you want from me?”

“Well.” Cosette stood very straight, and held her head very high. It was a studied pose, put-upon and forceful. Still, there was no light of recognition in her eyes. Éponine kept herself braced for the moment it came. “I have rather strong opinions about thieves.”

“Not what I asked.”

“One of my strong opinions about thieves,” continued Cosette, with rather too much emphasis, “is that they should, by some means or other, have all they need. You haven't been stealing enough to re-sell; you don't look like much of a black market runner. What I want for you, specifically, is to have what you need.”

Éponine's fingers dug hard into her palms. There was no one in the world she could stand less charity from. “Why?”

“Because you broke through my warding charms, and I don't like that at all. So, you'll answer my questions about how and why, and I,” she swung around the satchel once more, like a carrot dangling in front of a donkey, “will leave this with you.”

Azelma's assessment, of course, hadn't been wrong in the slightest, but Éponine hadn't been quite pessimistic enough to think it could possibly be this accurate. She'd seen moonwort in the satchel, half-silver and precious. How in the world Cosette did it was a mystery to each one of the customers that Éponine had spoken to. No one should have a thumb green enough to dig moonwort out of the earth as early as May, in a climate as volatile as France's and air as polluted as that of Paris.

It was almost enough to laugh about. Too good for spells, a witch like that, but not at all above some good, old-fashioned extortion.

“Oh,” Cosette added lightly, and held up her other hand, presenting a small golden ring set with a single green jewel. It was positively buzzing with enchantment. “And I'll know when I'm being lied to. So, deal?”

* * *

Cosette had expected to be frightened. There was no telling how it'd go, confronting a thief in broad daylight, but she'd hoped to have the wits to be at least a little bit scared. The girl before her, dark eyes that seemed to snarl all on their own and shoulders curled inwards like a wolf's, was doubtlessly frightening to some people; her spell the other night had at been enough to make Cosette dizzy even through her warding.

It was different, though, seeing her here. Cosette's impulse to drag her to a coffee shop in order to extort answers had been slightly panicked, yes, but she couldn't really be held accountable considering the circumstances, and it softened a tense situation quite considerably.

She slid a mug of plain green tea across the table to the girl. “You're sure you don't want anything to eat? They have some sandwiches that look to die for –”

“No,” said the girl shortly. She didn't touch her tea. “ _Ask_.”

“What's your name?”

The girl said nothing.

Cosette sighed. “You'll answer _some_ of these, won't you? I thought we'd agreed.”

“You don't need to know my name,” said the girl, which was fair enough. But then, Cosette hadn't needed to buy her matcha, either.

“What spell are you working on?”

Something came across the thief's features. “Tracking spell.”

The stone in Cosette's ring flashed red and hot. Cosette raised an eyebrow. The girl shrugged.

“Could've been a bluff. The spell's for forgetting.”

“Are you planning use it on yourself?”

“No.”

“Are you doing it to hurt someone?”

The girl's lips parted. From the mug in front of her, steam rose to obscure her face. Cosette looked away for a moment, pretending her triple chocolate cookie held some intrigue or other.

“I need someone to stop looking for me,” said the girl. Her voice was quiet and hollow in equal measure, and an uncomfortable feeling stirred in Cosette's chest. “They have to forget I exist. There's no other way to for me to be safe.”

It occurred to Cosette, staring fixedly at her cookie, that she might be a horrible person. On her left hand, her ring remained cool.

“It's hard, isn't it?” Cosette touched the rim of her mug. “The spell. Have you been trying for long?”

“A year,” came the response. It was calmly resigned.

“Do you need help with it?”

“No.” A burst of red, and the girl flinched. “You said you'd leave it alone if I answered.”

“Yes –” Cosette hadn't caught herself stuttering in years, but then, it had been a long time since she'd been so ashamed of anything. There were questions she hadn't asked yet, the formerly pressing ones, and they seemed suddenly unimportant. “Yes, I did.”

The girl was looking at her when Cosette forgot her own cowardice for long enough to look up. Her eyebrows were drawn together in a distrustful frown, but there was something else in there, a gentle sort of confusion. She must not have expected Cosette to falter.

Cosette took a deep breath. “Do you have questions for me?”

“Can't see what the point would be.” The girl reached for her tea, which, for Cosette, was victory enough. “We don't all have enchanted jewellery for lie-detectors.”

“No, that's true.” Cosette twisted the ring on her finger. She was tempted, for a moment, to pull it off and present it to the girl, but it was tied to her, and wouldn't work the same. “But you don't strike me as someone who's very easy to lie to.”

“You could be a good liar.”

Cosette shrugged. She broke off some of her cookie and chewed in silence. Its sweet taste was oddly ashen. The girl peered at her over the mug of tea.

“Who taught you to garden?” Cosette's apparently obvious offence was met with a weak smile. “Come on. You don't learn how to enchant soil from a library book; this magic has to be centuries old. If it were written down anywhere, more people would be doing it.”

A convenient lie crossed Cosette's mind, and then, fast on its heels, the shrill scream of her conscience. Anyway, she'd taken plenty of stupid risks so far, what was one more? “Do you remember when the last great coven was dissolved?”

The girl's eyebrows shot up. “The Perpetual Adoration? Didn't they all emigrate?”

“Yes. They dissolved in the mid-2000s, but a few years before – I was eight, maybe nine? – we were moving around a lot, my father and I, and when we were without shelter for a while, my father fell back on some forever-ago connection he had with the coven's gardener. Fauchelevent, was his name.” Cosette paused to sip her coffee, allowing the strong, black taste to wash out the increasingly urgent fear that she might be in the process of digging her own grave. “He persuaded the coven to house us. My father helped in the garden, and Fauchelevent taught me about some of the more – well, enchanting parts of it. He, uh, my father doesn't have magic. I think he was just happy to know I finally had someone to tutor me.”

“The Perpetual Adoration,” repeated the girl. She hadn't put her mug of tea down. “I didn't expect to be _that_ on point with the 'centuries old' thing.”

“It's mostly lost knowledge, now,” Cosette said, with a shrug that failed to be nonchalant. “Another victim of austerity politics, as they put it. The dissolution took a lot away. All the members are scattered, now, and Fauchelevent moved with us to Rue Plumet. He died a few years ago. We set up the garden together, but it was more him than me, to begin with. I'll never know everything he knew, and the coven forbade keeping books.”

The girl frowned. “There was no coven to forbid it anymore.”

“Loyalty.” Cosette smiled helplessly. “I can't bring myself to write down a single thing to this day.”

“Ah.” The mug thumped on the table. The thief, a hand still curled around its handle, shook her head slightly. “To your credit, if that's made up, it's imaginative enough to deserve being believed.”

For an odd moment, Cosette wished it were a lie. She hadn't shared this story with anyone, not even Musichetta, and so it had never struck her how heavy it felt to tell it. She missed Fauchelevent on most days, but it was a dull, quiet hurt. Saying his name had nicked a thin skin, and something was bleeding out.

“Look,” she said, shaking herself awake. “I really did mean it; I want you to have what you need. I put some of everything in the satchel that I could tell you took cuttings from, plus a little bit of anything rare I have, and I hope your spell works. But if it doesn't, or if you need anything else...” Cosette rummaged around in her purse, and finally placed a small card on the table. “Please consider calling me. I don't need money, but I don't appreciate being stolen from, and I'll work very hard to make it as difficult as possible for you in the future. So – you know. I hope it's come across that I'm a reasonable person whose good side isn't a bad place to be on.”

The girl stared at her. Her eyes went slowly down to the card in front of her, then, dark with a frown, back to Cosette's face. “Well,” she said finally, tucking the card into the pocket of her coat, “one of those things, at least, you've made clear enough.”

* * *

Éponine felt rotten.

For the year that she'd been trying, the spell had required incomparably careful planning, not because of its extravagant list of ingredients or its excessive ties to the lunar cycle – although, granted, those things presented challenges. Éponine found them easy to navigate. Less so was the presence of her younger sister in a space where neither of them was ever truly alone: Azelma had developed a keen eye for signs of exhaustion, and she was, like a true younger sister, devious in enforcing counter-measures when she detected any.

 _From nothing comes nothing_. The rules of magic weren't, at heart, different from those basic assumptions any science operated on; energy is never lost, and anything you wish to come out of a spell, you have to first put in. Four weeks into her fourth attempt, Éponine felt like she had put more of herself into this spell than she could stand to give.

Azelma was away for the night, staying with Gavroche wherever he'd been hiding away, and Éponine stood on unsteady legs before the sorry product of her latest effort. Words were the final step: they framed the spell like brackets of a code; they formed a shallow bowl in which magic, if it chose to, could make a home.

“I'm a coward, aren't I,” said Éponine to the library. The incantation was short, and it was old, the type of French that barely warranted the name, but none of that meant it warranted her trepidation.

Éponine breathed slowly. She lifted a small pitcher and began to pour its contents, milky green and smelling sharply of grass, into the paper filter she'd placed over a glass beaker. The beaker, upon successful completion of the spell, was to hold the distilled essence of its ingredients, clear as water, purified by the incantation. Its words felt written on the insides of Éponine's lids; she closed her eyes and whispered them as she poured, and with every word, the hand which poured felt less like her own.

The words ran out. Éponine fell to her knees, dropping the empty pitcher with a clatter onto the desk. For an instance, there was emptiness: the air from her lungs, the quick, racing brightness of her mind; the spell had drawn both from her. Something knelt on the library floor, gasping for breath, digging helpless fingers into the soft carpet, and as moments passed, it began to once again resemble Éponine.

She looked up. On the desk, the second beaker was filled to the brim with the colour of pine needles.

Azelma wasn't here.

Azelma wasn't here, so it made no difference whether or not Éponine got up off the floor, and almost no one would know if she cried.

She was kneeling, still, when a timid knock drew her to her feet, quick as lightning. Mabeuf's voice was low and gentle on the other side of the door, and this alone was enough kindness to make Éponine want to crawl out of her skin. She opened up the library nonetheless, with every intention of reassuring the old man, but a single look at her made his face fall.

“What in the world's gone wrong?”

Éponine was often an excellent liar, only she felt, just then, as if she was no longer excellent at anything at all. She said, honest and hollow, “I think I might be a terrible witch.”

Mabeuf looked astonished. The solution he proposed after a moment of stunned silence, true to form, was a cup of tea.

“I wish I were of more help when it comes to these things,” said the old man, settling in across from Éponine at the kitchen table. “See, no old witch will tell you this, but it goes along with everything else with age, the magic. Attempting whatever it is that's got you so out of breath would probably be enough to put me in the grave for good.”

 _Feels like it's enough to get me there, too_. Éponine said, “I'm sorry I never asked. What was it you worked with, when you still could?”

“Well, even at your age, I'm afraid I didn't quite have a hand for spells.” He smiled, kind and a little ironic. “The occasional charm, but mostly, I was a scribe. Banning magic on paper, that's what I was best at. Who knows? Maybe I wrote down the spell you're breaking your teeth on.”

“No,” said Éponine. “This isn't something you could ever have a hand in.”

“Ah, _ma bonne fée_.” The folds in Mabeuf's brow had deepened. “Is it so bad?”

“No. _Yes_. I'm sorry; I didn't want you to worry about any of this. Please believe me that for – for your home, it really is safe.”

“Oh, I'm very sure of that.” The frown made way for a smile that indicated some understanding. “Plenty of starlings outside, I've noticed lately. Odd for this time of year.”

“It should have worked, this time.” It _should_ have. She'd never been able to afford guesswork on moon phases; all her dates had been pinned down exactly to be in line with the spell's instructions. She knew the incantations, both initial and closing, inside and out. The ingredients, for the first time, had been without flaw. “The only explanation I have left is that it's my magic that's wrong. That I – _I'm_ not good enough.” She grimaced pronouncing it. To think that she'd ever become vain enough to find this surprising – had she ever, in her mind, been made invincible by magic?

“What spells do you love?”

Éponine looked up from where she'd been tightly gripping her mug. The simplicity of the question, utterly deceptive, delayed her answer by a few long moments. “Sleeping spells. To ward against nightmares.” She tilted her head. “Obviously, that's not how they work; nightmares can't be fought off. They're not external. But spells that can – quiet the mind, and calm the parts that might otherwise cause bad dreams...”

She used them on Azelma, when asked, which was, in her opinion, not nearly often enough. Magic never felt kinder than when it could offer the gift of a good night's sleep.

Mabeuf's face was harmlessly curious. “And do you find them easy?”

“I'm practised at them.”

“So they work reliably.”

She tried hard not to take offence. “Of course.”

“You know,” said Mabeuf, “it really sounds to me like you're not a terrible witch at all. In fact, I think you're very good. That's what makes all this so difficult for you.”

Éponine wondered if Mabeuf would ever run out of goodwill to offer, indiscriminately and artlessly. She stared at her tea.

“It's not... peaceful, is it, this spell you're working on?”

Éponine shook her head.

“Do you want to use it?”

Éponine's tea grew cold, and Monsieur Mabeuf's question remained unanswered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for a prompt from UnconquerableSoul, for whom I've wanted to write for a very long time, only to completely crumple up into a nervous ball of writer's block when they finally gave me the chance. Luckily, this fic has a pretty natural caesura right in the middle, so I thought it'd be better to have the first half up than nothing at all for another week. The second part is mostly written & will, muses willing, follow soon.  
> Thank you for reading! ❤ I'm [here](https://lesamis.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for any questions regarding what almanac I'm writing this by.


	2. Chapter 2

Perched on her window seat, which allowed her to look over the garden and, this time of year, to watch a rather spectacular sunset, Cosette was making a fairy.

Her fingers tied string around a cross of four leaves to fashion a pair of small wings, a bird would land, now and then, on the windowsill outside and then quickly try its luck in the garden again, mellow music was playing, and Cosette was not avoiding looking at her phone.

She wasn't. No one who was avoiding looking at their phone would pick it up now and then to switch playlists, safe in the knowledge that they'd muted all their chats.

Musichetta had promised to text her with news today, and Cosette was not avoiding looking at her phone.

The fairy began to take shape, primrose wings and marigold crown with a wand of yarrow. Cosette's playlist cut out, her phone rang, and she jumped in place sharply enough to toss the half-finished arrangement in a high arch out of the window.

Cosette scrambled for her phone. “ _Bad_ timing, Musichetta,” she hissed as she picked up, and regretted it even before the thief on the other end said, in a dry voice, “I do have the right number, don't I?”

“Oh!” Cosette dropped against the window frame on an exhale. “Gosh. So sorry, I was expecting someone else to call.”

Silence. Then, “Would you like me to hang up...?”

“No! No, this is perfect, actually. You have a problem, right?” Cosette winced. “I mean. Can I help you with anything?”

There was a tinny sigh on the other end. The thief – predictably, Cosette thought – did not enjoy asking for help. “Maybe.”

Not much later, Cosette had retrieved the slightly ruined attempt at a fairy, and the thief stood at the open door of her bedroom and stared silently inside.

Ah.

Cosette was, as a rule, a tidy person, it was just that there were only so many ways one could be tidy about approximately a hundred bunches of herbs and flowers hung up to dry in one's bedroom. Her father, when she'd started this, had offered her use of the study, but Cosette liked to keep a close eye on things, and thought that this saved her a lot of thought going into interior decor, anyway.

The number of dead and dying – in the most unimaginative sense of the word – plants was evened out by the number of live ones, sprawling on every available surface of the room. The thief's eyes had become stuck on the largest one near the bed, with lush dark leaves and flowers the shape of bells.

“That's Reginald,” said Cosette quickly, and realised rather late that this was unlikely to make her seem less unhinged. “He's – um. I keep him outside normally; he's here for – therapy.”

The thief's concerned eyes found, instead of the plant, Cosette.

“He's a mandrake,” said Cosette, increasingly desperate.

“Right. Yes. Listen, I wanted to say...” The thief stayed carefully at the bedroom door, like a vampire waiting to be invited in. “Since I'm – in your house. My name is Éponine.”

“Oh! That's pretty.”

Éponine's stare had become more intense. She seemed braced for a blow.

Cosette, in lieu of anything else to do, extended her hand. “I'm Cosette.”

Éponine had brought the spell page, its ineffective product, and scattered ingredients along with her, and spread them out on the floor between them. Cosette liked neither the sight of the ingredients, not the look of the torn-out book page; she disliked spells on principle and was still more distrustful of those that strained her botanical nerve just to see together.

Foxglove and cranesbill; tailflower and angel's trumpet. Sage to purify. Cosette herself had been the one to supply the rattlensake weed, which she doubted was grown elsewhere in France, but alongside with whatever poison garden Éponine had plucked the others from...

“Is this memory spell meant to have the handy side-effect of killing a man?”

“No, of course not.” Éponine frowned. “Ingredients don't keep their initial properties. What kind of a witch are you?”

“The kind that gardens,” said Cosette, nonplussed. “This is an atrocity. No wonder nothing came of it. None of these work together; it's like asking for allelopathy.”

“For _what_?”

“They eat each other! I wouldn't put these together even for decorative purposes, and you're trying to do magic with them? Who sold you that spell?”

“No one.” Éponine crossed her arms. “What do you know about spells, anyway?”

Cosette flushed.

Truthfully, she knew very little. Fauchelevent had taught her enchantments and plants, and such had been the extent of what magic, in his view, should be used for. Cosette had never asked if the coven itself had shared this attitude, but she certainly did. Enchanting an object could do little enough harm, sinister as the act may sometimes look. Spells interfered with a human being's will and physicality and worse: spells, as it seemed, were happy to walk all over the most basic golden rule of “What grows together, goes together.”

“Give me the page, please,” said Cosette tightly.

She meant to scan the instructions, but her eye stuck instead on the brief description of purpose that was written down in shaky Middle French.

 _Draught for the erasure of one's memory, to combat grief or protect from harm; to erase from the mind of a parent the recollection of a child's life_.

“Cosette?”

Cosette blinked. Her eyes were wet. Éponine was watching her with an anxious concern that needed, as soon as possible, to be dispensed with.

“Right,” said Cosette, and tapped her finger hard against the small paragraph beneath the initial incantation. “This must be it; you're meant to start in the first quarter. Have you been paying attention to the moon phases?”

“If you could give me the benefit of the doubt for one moment.” Éponine's anxiety had been, rather successfully, Cosette thought, replaced with irritation. “I've not been trained in a coven, fine, but I _can_ read.”

“Of course. Did you leave the moonwort's berries intact when you added them in the third quarter?”

“...No.”

“You might have to let them dissolve,” said Cosette. “I always find they don't like having their skin broken, when I use them for enchantments. This mentions no step to crush them; I think the magic should take care of it when you distil it all at the end.”

She pointed the same out for some of the other plants, touching them only with gloved hands and explaining how she'd treat them for a charm. Éponine listened carefully, cutting in rarely with questions or plain disagreements, and whenever she did, another piece in the puzzle that spellmaking presented to Cosette seemed to slot into place.

The ingredients to Éponine's spell, in their individual toxicities and effects on the human body, told a story. Hogweed, which could cause blindness; rattlesnake weed of the euphorbia family, the sap of which irritated the eyes; angel's trumpet, which could cause hallucinations so strong they might sever anyone's connection to reality. Cosette followed the story to its natural conclusion at the end of the cycle, and found that the spell spoke its own language, like the metaphors and equations of common platitudes: _seeing is believing_.

“If I can, I want to try again right away,” said Éponine once they'd gone through the instructions step by step. “First quarter's from the 30th; so if I were to start now...”

“We'd land on the night after the solstice.” Cosette got up to pluck her calendar off the wall. “New moon's June 21st. At least that way we'll have a definitive answer, because frankly, if it doesn't work on midsummer, the spell's no good.”

Éponine looked back and forth between the calendar and her, and Cosette realised what she'd said.

“I mean,” she added quickly, “if you want my help? Obviously I can't – _know_ , from a distance, but a spell like this, it seems like it'd take a lot of energy – so if – that is to say, I'm sure you're powerful enough; I'm not implying –”

“Why?” Éponine looked frustrated. “What do you want from me? I can do nothing for you. Worse, I've only ever taken from you. Why do you want to do this?”

The question wasn't unreasonable; it shouldn't even have been unexpected. Cosette wondered why she hadn't prepared a better answer for it. Was there something she wanted? Nothing admissible. She shrugged. “Don't you need all the help you can get?”

“So what if I do?”

“So I'll give my help. Let me worry about why.”

“I like to know what I owe,” insisted Éponine, dangerously quiet. “If you're planning to hold this over me at any later point –”

“Then you can walk away from it.” Cosette rubbed at her forehead with the back of her hand. She suddenly felt very tired. “Is it so hard to believe that I'm not made of stone? I can't imagine being alone with something like this. If I've made you believe that I think you, or anyone, could ever deserve that, that's my mistake. I'm sorry. But let me help. It might not even make a difference; I don't know. Maybe two witches are better than one, even if one of them hasn't cast a spell in her life.”

For a moment, Cosette feared that she'd lost her. More words rarely made a more persuasive impact. Éponine had the most unnerving gaze Cosette had ever encountered; there was no hiding from her.

“Fine,” said Éponine. She looked, at once, like the condemned walking to the gallows and the man at the longer end of the rope. “Let's spell my family.”

* * *

There was no keeping secrets from Azelma. Éponine had been trying all her life. Her younger sister was nosy, ruthless, and had never, same as Éponine, been able to afford a sense of personal space around her siblings. Éponine had told her of the failed spell, she had told her she would try again, she had not said a word about Cosette – but there was no keeping secrets from Azelma.

“I'm coming with you.” Azelma began to pull on her boots right where she'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“No, you're not.” Éponine set herself before the library door like a watchdog. “No shoes inside the house.”

“Fine, I'll put them on downstairs.”

“No, you won't, because you're not going out. We're lucky she hasn't recognised me on my own; you want to jog her memory?”

“Someone probably used whatever you're trying to do on her,” said Azelma, picking up her boots. “She hasn't remembered you; she's not going to remember me. Are you expecting me to just let you go there on your own? You said yourself her magic was –”

“I'm never on my own,” said Éponine. “And she doesn't even know how to use spells; she can't hurt me. What'd she do, enchant my shoelaces to trip me?”

Éponine wanted to tell Azelma, in words that made sense, that the Cosette she'd met, now, quite simply didn't have it in her to hurt – anyone. She might be capable, the assertion that she wasn't was an underestimation at best and an outright lie at worst, but there was no painless way of explaining to Azelma that Cosette seemed to have become, through whatever twists of fate had driven them apart, good.

“She doesn't have to see me.” Azelma crossed her arms. “Let me come to the house, at least. I can wait outside with your little friends.”

There was no keeping secrets from Azelma, and there was, once she'd set her mind on something, no dissuading her, either.

They'd done well to separate at the corner of Rue Vaneau and Rue d'Olivet, leaving Azelma to keep some distance to the house, because Cosette was waiting in her garden when Éponine arrived, looking as at home as she must be between fern and primroses that were beginning to curl in for the night. She came up to open the garden gate – it had been enchanted again, Éponine had to suppose, and required confirmation before admitting anyone.

“I thought it'd be best to work outside,” said Cosette, leading her around the (monumental, frankly; unreasonably imposing) house. “We're so lucky to get a clear night, and I've found enchantments work best under the open sky.”

So did spells, which Éponine knew, but Mabeuf was likely to be uncomfortable with spellwork in his house as it was, and Éponine had no wish to project it to his neighbours in addition. Behind the house, where the garden, in its neat ring, continued and sprawled into patches of wildflowers, vegetables, and tall grass – even climbing rods for beanstalks, put up neatly in a far corner – was a small paved circle where Cosette had laid out the necessary.

It was an absurdly perfect place for magic. Éponine's lips tasted bitter when she bit them.

As they worked in silence, the sun set the rest of the way; Cosette lit shallow torches around them. Most ingredients Éponine had brought herself, as if to assert any sort of independence, as if Cosette hadn't been the one to give them to her in the first place, but they replenished what was best used fresh, sage and moonwort, and Cosette prepared, never without first asking, those plants that were most fragile and obstinate.

Attempt number four, thought Éponine. Pride had no place in this.

Cosette wrinkled her nose as she read through the initial incantation.

“It'll work best if you memorise it,” Éponine informed her soberly. “I know it's not exactly high brow.”

“No, that isn't it.” Cosette shook her head. “It's a bit – visceral, is all.”

“That's what spells are. Why, what do you use for enchantments? Poetry?”

“Sometimes.” In a trick of the torchlight, it looked as if Cosette was blushing. “Not important; I've got it, rhymes or no. Are you ready?”

Éponine looked at the work scattered between them. Their plant ingredients were spread in neat rows in a shallow bowl; Éponine still held the small envelope with locks of hair closely in her hand. Above them, the moon was a pale half-disk of light to which Éponine closed her eyes. A breath in, and she could feel the push and pull of it; a breath out, and there was the earth, writhing and dark and alive.

She opened her eyes. “I am.” Éponine placed careful fingers at the edges of the bowl. Cosette's hands, moving to join them, stopped mid-air.

“What happened to your hands?”

Éponine looked down at them. Azelma had bandaged her up earlier, and she'd forgotten about the cuts and scratches already; they had never impeded her magic before. “Met a cat,” said Éponine shortly. “You're sure you're comfortable doing this? Will does matter.”

“I am. Sorry.” Cosette took a deep breath in, and covered Éponine's hands with hers.

In the past, Éponine had closed her eyes for incantations: otherwise, they wandered, looked for intruders, kept vigilant, broke her focus. Now, to speak in synchrony with Cosette, she watched her lips. “ _Come with the flow of tides_ ,” said Éponine, listening to Cosette's voice like an echo of her own, “ _come from each gulf and chasm; come from the moon above; come from the life below us_.”

Their hands moved; Éponine slipped the paper sachet into the bowl and ran careful fingers through dried and newly living leaves and flowers. Cosette, across from her, lit a bundle of sage on a small candle in their circle. “ _Womb's water be unspilled; be filial sins unwritten; that which is tied in blood be severed by belonging_.”

Éponine pulled her hands away, and Cosette dropped burning sage into the bowl. They reached, together, for a water pitcher and poured as soon as the sage had burned up fully, filling the bowl to the brim, and Cosette placed it carefully back on the ground.

“Well,” Cosette said in an uneven voice. Éponine felt it, too, but she was long familiar with the thrust of pain, the sudden drain of energy, as if she'd gone three days without sleep. It did not feel nearly as frightening now as it always had before – now that there were two of them to share the pain – and Éponine wouldn't let go of that guilt for some time. “I'd say you can afford to be cautiously optimistic.”

“On the safer side not to be.” Éponine picked up the bowl and funnelled its contents, carefully, into a glass phial. “Thank you, Cosette.”

It sounded as stilted as it felt. Gratitude sat wrong in Éponine's chest, it always had. It never came alone, either: Gratitude was the fear of whatever price would be named; gratitude was the guilt of depriving someone else. Here, it was the guilt of dishonesty, too. Éponine had no concept of how to feel it right, much less of how to put something so clawed and unwieldy into words.

Cosette, her face warmly lit by the torch-fire, was watching. “May I ask you something?”

 _She said, in her own damn garden, half-passed out from a spell she has no stake in_. Éponine indicated 'yes' with a vague shrug.

“Why a spell? I know,” Cosette added quickly, “that I've no idea what I'm talking about, with spells, but when it comes to protection, I've always thought charms were extremely effective. For hiding, too. They can make you practically undetectable.”

Éponine corked the phial carefully. She wrapped it in linen, placed it gently in her bag, and wished Cosette were an easier person to lie to. “I broke through them,” she said. Cosette frowned. “Took me a week. Took me some help, too, but nothing out of the way. A week's worth of work, and I could steal from you. I don't think charms aren't powerful. You didn't even falter at the diffusion spell I threw at you. Whatever you're using clearly works. But it's shifty and impermanent, too: break the object, and you've broken the enchantment. I want –” _I want safety that can't be destroyed_. Éponine moved in place on her knees. Was she really still so childish? “I have to do better than that. How can I tell anyone in good conscience that they're safe when it all hinges on a _thing_ that could be burned, or cut up, or broken? That's not safety. It's just a delay.”

“So it's not just you.” Cosette had pulled in her knees, and rested her chin on top of them. Éponine had barely realised how cold it had become. “You said before that you needed someone to forget you, singular.”

Éponine shrugged. “Spell's the same.”

“Your siblings, then?”

“You heard the incantation.” Éponine stood. Something had to be enough to keep Cosette from prodding further. Gods knew why she answered, anyway, as if she had nothing to lose in the process. “Thank you, again. I'm sorry about –” The words got stuck in her throat. She made a vague gesture. Cosette had gotten to her feet, and swayed slightly; Éponine steadied her with hands to her shoulders.

“I'm fine; it's fine.”

Éponine dropped her hands.

The torch light, closer to the ground, had been warm, and it had hidden, in its uneven flicker, a number of things that now felt exposed. They stood in spell-numb silence, for a moment, facing each other under half a dyad moon like two sides of a mirror, and Éponine wanted to tell the truth.

A bird call, too long after sundown, startled her out of her trance.

Éponine said something like a thank you, and Cosette walked with her to the garden gate. Having watched Cosette close the door of the house behind her, Éponine hurried to find her sister, who was tossing mealworms to a flock of starlings in the dark.

* * *

Cosette was intensely familiar with her father's veiled expressions of concern. She knew each precise meaning of his roundabout ways of caring; she could have written them all down like a dictionary of haphazardly repressed affection.

Elaborate desserts picked up from Maison Mulot, she'd come to learn, meant he thought she wasn't eating well enough.

“Here's a deal,” she said when he hesitantly brought up the suggestion of pastries after dinner. “I'll have some if you will.”

Her father, who had rather the opposite of a sweet tooth, smiled over some other expression. “You've really become too good a businesswoman to be easily persuaded, haven't you?”

“I'm a harsh negotiator.”

“Oh? That must help with profits.”

“I don't need profits.” She poked his arm across the table. “I'll have some éclairs with you, papa, don't you worry. Nothing can stand long between me and choux pastry.”

He did worry, though, and had reason to. It hadn't taken her long to understand that Éponine's look when they'd met, that lean, hungry stare, hadn't been hunger of any sort that food could help. Cosette had slipped a sandwich and some fruit into the linen satchel that day at the coffee shop, knowing she'd leave the bag with Éponine later, but she'd missed the point: it was the spell, not malnourishment, that had hollowed Éponine out. Cosette learned since then, on her own body, that a spell first took what it would later give.

The memory of a whole life wasn't erased easily. They shared the burden and the effort, now, but Éponine had been trying on her own for a whole year. That she'd still stood on two feet when Cosette had found her in the garden was a terrifying miracle.

Her father's eyes, anxious and careful, remained on her all evening. She'd never been good at bearing it without commentary, and she hated little more than being dishonest with him. _It'll almost be over after tonight_ , she wanted to tell him, and _You won't have to worry anymore, not about me, not about me at all, or about what I know, or what I don't_. He deserved to know.

After dinner and a rather unreasonable dessert, Cosette sat in the pergola outside and waited. New moon was here, and the air was still as full of it as it could be, full of magic and midsummer buzzing, from the previous night. Éponine arrived at the gate not long after sundown, looking unwell and stern. Cosette thought that she would give a lot to be even remotely as strong, and then she thought that it was astoundingly ungenerous to envy Éponine for the things that had made her this way.

In the eastern garden, hidden behind the house, they knelt opposite one another in the stone circle, and Cosette hated that she was afraid, but she hated even more the tension in Éponine's features, the hard-pulled way she held herself, like she was expecting to be struck.

Cosette breathed deeply. “We'll do it this time, Éponine.” She nodded, as if to reassure herself. “It's going to work.”

Across from her, Éponine looked ill. “You'll have to be confident enough for both of us.”

“I am.” Éponine had set up two pitchers and a filter between them, and Cosette placed her hands carefully on the lower vessel. “You pour?”

“Together,” said Éponine shortly, and closed her eyes for a brief moment, adjusting her posture. Cosette hadn't seen her so afraid before.

Éponine closed her hand around the pitcher that held the product of the past three weeks. Cosette did the same, lower down on the ceramic handle, and they shared a look before beginning the incantation at the same time: the faster this was over, the better.

“ _By nature's law united and cleft by force of will_ ,” Cosette watched Éponine's eyes slip closed, and they began to pour, slowly, “ _May each seed of remembrance dry up in dullest soil. Cognition be extinguished in waking life and dream_.” It worked. Cosette could feel it work, could feel it pull something out through her fingertips and into the pitcher, pouring out more than they had put in, and her breath was pulled along with it; her voice pressed urgently on the last two lines before the air ran out: “ _Nor son nor daughter linger, but painlessly walk on_.”

Éponine's hand shook as she placed the pitcher down; Cosette steadied it with her own grip, but Éponine didn't open her eyes. Cosette looked down at the glass beaker between them. The liquid inside was crystal clear.

“Look,” she said to Éponine's eyes, still squeezed shut, her lashes wet with tears. “It's all right. Look, you've done it. It's all right.”

Éponine did look, for less than a second. Her eyes widened with something – horror, relief – and she closed them again, and sank together, hands upturned on the tops of her thighs in a pose Cosette recognised vaguely as prayer: thanking the gods with your hands for what had been placed within them. It was an old custom, too old for Cosette to have ever practised. She hadn't thought Éponine to be particularly inclined towards religion, but perhaps it wasn't about giving thanks to gods so much as it was an act of reconciliation with herself, a way of telling her body, quietly, with open palms, that it was finally over.

Cosette knelt, closed her eyes, and turned and uncurled her hands.

When she opened her eyes, Éponine was watching her. The beaker that had held the completed spell was gone. Returned had the wariness she'd seen in Éponine earlier, the perpetual expectation of something, anything, jumping at her with its claws out.

“Told you,” said Cosette softly. “Midsummer, two witches, every ingredient treated as it should be. You couldn't go wrong.”

“Yes.” Éponine's eyes on her didn't move away even for a moment.

They wouldn't get a better occasion for this: nor was there, Cosette feared, a worse one. She set her shoulders. “I have a favour to ask.”

Éponine exhaled. As Cosette had thought, she actually looked relieved, in a sour way, to be proved right. “Of course you do.”

“You won't have to do anything,” said Cosette quickly. “I just want advice. Or – maybe some help; this isn't exactly my area of expertise.”

“Spit it out.”

“Éponine, I don't want you to _repay_ me.” Cosette swallowed down the agitation; her anger belonged to someone else, and had no place here. “I'm asking you this because you know things I don't, and because you're gifted, and because I'm so inexperienced with spells that this one drained me almost completely, and I'd like for that to change. At least enough for one spell.”

Éponine's expression changed. “What do you want to do?”

“I want –” Cosette did not want to do anything. She wanted things to stop: the resentment, the rage that ate away at her, the constant fury at past cruelties which she couldn't show to anyone who mattered. She wanted justice, and could never bring it about, and so she would settle for the lesser thing. “I want retribution.”

She'd forgotten herself. The horror on Éponine's face was instant, and Cosette shook her head quickly, reaching out across the circle to Éponine, and stopping midway. “There's someone – I've never met him. A friend traced him for me; I still had something of his she could use. I have no way of holding him accountable, Éponine, not by law, not personally; there's no conscience to appeal to, believe me. I just want something over him –”

“No.” Éponine edged away, pulled herself to her feet. “I'm not giving you a spell.”

Cosette recognised the heat in her chest, and it wasn't anger at all: it was fear. Éponine was cutting her loose, and she'd be adrift like this, without help or guidance, again, she'd be just as she'd been before. “Please,” she said, while Éponine was moving backwards, as if in a trance. “You don't have to do anything, I promise, if you could just tell me where to look – Éponine, he's the reason my mother died –”

“I'm sorry.” Éponine stood frozen, now, arms rigid at her sides. “I'm sorry, and I believe you that he'd deserve to be spelled all the way to hell, but I won't help you do it.”

“I'm not asking for help, I just want to _know_ –”

“But you shouldn't! If that's the path you want to go down, I can't stop you, but I'm advising against it, and I won't make it easier for you. You want to hurt yourself; I'm not going to be an instrument to it.”

“Is this about spells?” Cosette tried to match up the pieces, to fit together what she'd seen of Éponine, and failed at every turn. “ _You're_ trying to tell me I'm not supposed to wake spells? When you've used them for –”

“Yes, me! Do you know what I am?”

All at once, the fight went out of Cosette. Distantly, she was imagining birdcalls, echoing like a quiet, muted alarm, and Éponine stood before her, shoulders heaving. “Yes,” said Cosette. “I do. You're good, Éponine.”

Éponine said nothing else. She stared wide-eyed at Cosette, stood for a few more moments as if rooted to the ground, then tore herself away and disappeared behind the gate.

* * *

Éponine took the serum to Gavroche. It had always been planned like this, faraway and fanciful as the planning had then been, and she couldn't blame Gavroche for his surprise when she brought it along with definitive instructions. “They'll have to ingest all of it, so don't take any chances. A spell's no good if it doesn't come as close as can be, understand?”

Gavroche shrugged. “Poison our folks; got it.”

“It's not – well, I suppose it is, in a way.” And who better to administer it, really? Their mother had never cared for Gavroche; their father routinely forgot he existed. He was the only one who could show his face with them without being drawn back in. “I've undone all the charms around the place, but they'll notice in a while, and it won't work if they have any warding on themselves. Look out for what doesn't look right; jewellery or decoration.”

“Hm. What if I can't do it today?”

“Steal what you can, make sure you remember every charm you can't get to, and I'll be back to undo them another time.” Gavroche nodded, and Éponine realised that she'd been holding hard onto his shoulders and wasn't quite prepared to let go.

He'd be taller than her, soon. The thought struck her in a place she didn't know could hurt.

She squeezed his shoulders and let her hands drop. “There, off with you. I'll be waiting right here, and the others are around the house. Rain gutters, windowsills. Any trouble, you let us know.”

Gavroche grinned. His was an odd smile; it had gained angles, in the past year, and Éponine hadn't seen him enough to make her peace with them yet. “The only trouble in there'll be me,” he said, and hopped down from the wall he'd been perched on. “Promise.”

Éponine waited. She waited, and tried not to think; trying not to think made her feel, so she thought instead. She hadn't grown up in this house – she'd even had to track it down, first, the four-story concrete monster that glared at her now. It wasn't a good place for magic, which loved to hide. No history, no nooks or crannies to speak of, no secret little hiding places under old floorboards, or pillars to ring with charmed wreaths, and this came as a relief. She'd not been able to get inside to check for charms, but Gavroche, even without magic, knew how to recognise a charm well enough.

Such was the theory, anyway. Éponine made herself as cerebral as she could. In all the time that she'd been planning, she hadn't, not once, been able to imagine what it'd feel like to come so close to succeeding, and now that she was here, it felt like nothing at all. She had a suspicion that if she stopped thinking for a moment, it would devastate her, and she would give no one, least of all herself, that power.

The sun had set when Gavroche came running out of the front door, and Éponine caught him, heart hammering, by an arm. “Did –?”

“All of it,” he said. “I watched. It's gone, all of it.”

She rushed forward, pulling him in, and held him hard in her arms. Her relief was for having him back much more than it was for the spell: if it took root, they'd have won everything, and lost just the same.

Gavroche ruffled her hair. When she sobbed out something like a laugh, he pulled back to look at her, eyes narrowed and suspicious. “You _really_ didn't kill them, did you?”

“Shut up.” She took a deep breath. “Right. Go find Azelma. I'll be around tomorrow.”

“Oh?” His look became still more curious. “Got something else to do?”

“Somewhere else to be.” She pressed his hand. “Off, now.”

Her 'somewhere else' was exactly where she was. Éponine sat, legs pulled close before her, in the deepening dark, watched the house, and waited.

She stayed all night. The goings-on of this corner of Paris weren't something to witness without danger, but no one came near her, and Éponine watched the lighting-up of windows and the flickering of streetlights by herself, thinking in circles and setting off spells, twice, to keep warm. She'd not returned to Rue Plumet since they had completed the serum a week ago, and she wouldn't be back, but there were familiar eyes set on the house, and Cosette didn't appear to be doing anything out of the usual. Éponine couldn't justify to herself why it mattered. It shouldn't. It did.

When she'd first suggested this to her siblings, it hadn't taken them any time to agree. Gavroche hadn't hesitated; Azelma had not hesitated at first and then spent several months going back and forth. Éponine hadn't permitted herself the luxury of hesitance, or of wondering what she wanted. What had Mabeuf meant to gain from asking? Surely that wasn't how people made choices. Surely that wasn't how people decided, every day, whether or not they'd do the terrible thing.

And anyway, what was one more terrible thing to her?

In the morning, Madame Thénardier left her building, quick and hurried, and walked past a young girl staring at her from the bench of a bus stop. Herself childless and used to the younger who scurried about the neighbourhood, running from trouble or looking for it, she spared her no second glance.

* * *

On a Tuesday in mid-July, Cosette stood in the square before an office building in La Défense and waited. She had yet to decide what, exactly, it was that she was waiting for, or what she was planning to do when it arrived. Such things were not to be rushed.

And they hadn't been, that much was embarrassingly obvious. Cosette had known before that she'd made a valuable friend; she was more certain about it now that almost two months had passed since Musichetta had provided her with a name and address, and Cosette was yet to do anything about it. Not a single pointed question or remark had come from Musichetta. Cosette had a feeling that if she showed up at Musichetta's apartment tomorrow and announced for all to hear “I killed the bastard”, the most she'd get would be an understanding clap on the shoulder.

Éponine hadn't shown her face again. Cosette had looked for spells on her own. She'd learned enough, she thought, about both spells and Éponine, to know that there wasn't anything to fear that she wasn't prepared to face. Her first attempts had been stumbling, and she'd failed at the simplest things. Spells worked in metaphors and on intent, neither of which came naturally to Cosette, whose plants had always done such work for her.

Cosette waited. It had come as no surprise to her to find out that her search would lead her here of all places: if one was looking for a monster, one often needed to look no further than the next best big-shot lawyer who bailed out big pharma for a living. She'd never come anywhere near here before. It felt like no magic could possibly exist in a place like this, surrounded by mirrors and concrete with not a tree in sight.

Cosette waited. She knew what he looked like. She looked nothing like him. She'd memorised his face like a particularly hateful piece of poetry, and she'd found company photos from events to get an idea of how he dressed. She knew what briefcase he owned. When he left the building via the smaller doors to the side, Cosette had even seen his suit before. She moved mechanically – he wouldn't walk all the way to the metro; he lived outside the city, and was sure to drive himself, so she walked quickly across the square, and immediately stopped in place when he did.

He'd stopped to dig for his phone. Cosette stared at his back, at the profile of his face when he tilted it to the side to lift his phone to his ear. She felt nothing at all. In her mind, she'd thought that she'd know, instinctively, what to do when she saw him; the hot rage that pulled at her so constantly would tell her, surely, what it was that she needed. Seeing him like this, carefree and well-dressed and dripping money, he might be any other businessman she'd see on a train.

A starling landed on the stone street. Félix Tholomyès took a call, and Cosette heard his voice.

Nothing about him had been familiar. Not his eyes, not the easy smile he wore, or the way he held himself. Cosette had kept her hands in the pockets of her dress, fingers clenched tightly around tiny sachets of spells, wakeful and potent, and she heard his voice – that voice, piercingly, horribly familiar like something from a dream, and she wanted to run up to him and cast every iota of pain and power she'd pulled out of herself into his wide-open eyes.

She stood rooted to the spot. Above her, the sky darkened, but she couldn't look up. Was this cowardice? She saw herself as if from above, half-blind with anger, heart in her throat, and couldn't move a muscle.

The suited man, still on the phone, craned his neck. Cosette would have followed his gaze, but her muscles did not obey her, and she couldn't think; her head suddenly held nothing but his voice, some long-since cast out remembrance that hurled the past violently into the present. They were less memories than they were images, snapshots of a half forgotten history, but she remembered. She remembered his voice, which wasn't a cruel one at all: it was gentle, familiar, kind.

Cosette's hand was pressed to her mouth. No more than a few metres away, a man in a suit had fallen silent, and was staring up in horror at the darkening sky.

His voice had been kind. Cosette shook with hatred. He had smiled, and talked gently, and he had cast them smiling into hell.

Louder and louder: the calls of a hundred starlings, three hundred, six hundred, twisting through the glassy winds and bends of La Défense.

Cosette stumbled backwards. The cacophony descended upon the square as a flock of birds, moving like a cloud of iridescent blues and greens between high-rise buildings and traffic lights, swallowed up the suited man in a sharp-winged storm of beaks and claws.

* * *

As a girl, Éponine had cared for animals.

Looking back, she couldn't quite understand why: perhaps it had been easier to extend that empathy to stray kittens or injured foxes that she hadn't felt for fellow children, back then. One morning, long before she'd thought of herself as a witch, she'd picked a dazed bird from a windowsill after the little thing had flown against the glass. She'd made it a nest in a plastic bowl, given it water to sip, and killed houseflies to hold carefully up to its beak, and that night, she'd dreamed of flying in a swirling murmuration over the city, watching over Paris's roofs with a thousand eyes.

Starlings had nested in the sharp corner of rain gutters by her bedroom window that same spring. The morning the chicks had hatched, Éponine had woken up in a cold sweat, heart racing, palms wet with anguish.

Scratches on her skin and aches in her bones had started coming and going, and she never remembered how she'd gotten them. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she could see her street from above.

Cosette took less than a day to seek her out. Éponine saw her turn the corner of Rue de Mézières and quickly made her way out of the library, careful not to wake her siblings.

Waiting at the end of the street, like she'd known Éponine would meet her, Cosette did not look angry. She did not look happy, either. Éponine stood some way away from her.

Cosette spoke first. “It was you, then?”

Éponine felt claws dig into her shoulder. She lifted a hand and touched a finger to the soft feathers at the bird's throat. “I've no idea what you mean.”

“Will anyone trace it to you?”

“No,” said Éponine, strangely automatic. She hadn't been expecting the question. “No one will suspect magic.”

“Not suspect magic? Behind a huge flock of birds attacking a single man?”

“There's no spell for such a thing.” Éponine shrugged. “Impossible to do. And what else would it be? France hasn't seen any familiars in a century. What was it De Villiers said?” She smiled coolly. “ _No witch in a civilised society could now be base enough to be receptive to such feral magic_.”

Cosette looked unconvinced, although the citation made her relax. She shifted where she stood. “Plenty of feathers for them to trace.”

Éponine gave a noncommittal hum. Cosette shook her head. Of course it wasn't enough: it never was. Azelma hadn't stopped asking her questions for months, and she still found it strange. This felt natural only to Éponine.

“What happened to you?” Cosette had come closer, and saw Éponine's face now, the bruises on her cheeks and thin red lines at her neck. “Do they hurt you?”

“I feel what they feel,” said Éponine. This morning, the pain had eased, but yesterday had been agony, every angry lash and scratch and beat of a fist upon the bird's bodies making its way, as it happened in La Défense, to her. Azelma had lectured her for almost an hour. “They feel what I feel. Familiars don't just do a witch's bidding for nothing in return, I'm sure you know. Imagine if magic worked so tyrannically.”

Cosette looked horrified. “So all those starlings – ?”

“No, not all of them. Twelve, at the moment, and it changes,” Éponine gestured vaguely in circles. “They die; they have young ones. The bond's hereditary. But in a murmuration, each bird responds to the movements of their seven closest neighbours.”

For a moment, Cosette appeared to be trying to do the maths in her head. Then, “Why did you do it?”

“Because I owed you,” said Éponine, puzzled. Surely, that much had been obvious? “Because it shouldn't have been up to you to do it.”

“It shouldn't have been up to you, either.” Cosette looked bewildered, and then suddenly pained. “Your face –”

“I'm used to it.”

“That doesn't make it okay!”

“Not the – I don't mean the bond. Yes, it hurts; yes, I've come to expect it, but that's not it.” Éponine inhaled. “You were going to spell him, weren't you?”

Cosette lowered her eyes, and didn't deny it.

“You've felt what they're like. Spells take from you while you wake them; when you cast them, they take even more. There's no coming back from that.” Éponine moved her shoulder. The starling there fluttered up and sought a tree-branch nearby. “I know it might not be enough. If you still want to go after him, I'm not going to interfere.”

“You didn't have to, the first time.”

“Yes, I did.”

Cosette stared at Éponine, quiet and uncomprehending. She didn't repeat her question of why.

Mabeuf called Éponine good. He called her kind, his helping fairy, and the like, and she could never find it in her to protest. Who was she to deny an old man his gentle view of the world? And then, it stood to reason that to him, it wasn't untrue. She'd never stood by and watched as he was hurt; she'd never failed to help him. She'd never let her own apathy become a monstrosity to him.

Éponine had thought, watching Cosette on her way to La Défense, seeing her tremble with anger at the sight of that man, that she'd have done her part after this. Looking at Cosette now, she wondered how in the world she'd ever thought they could be even.

“You have nothing to prove to me, Éponine.” Cosette, before her, had set her shoulders, just like she had that first night. She'd looked unafraid and challenging, then, and Éponine had since learned that this was what Cosette did when she felt scared. “Nothing at all.”

 _Yes, I do_. Éponine opened her mouth, but Cosette cut her off first, saying nothing and closing her arms tightly around Éponine's shoulders.

“I already know,” said Cosette. Her grip was hard. “I knew you, and I know. I never forgot, it never – I remember everything.”

Éponine was elsewhere. Cosette held her, calm and without fear, and Éponine stood and watched from above.

* * *

As a girl, Cosette had had nightmares.

Her stay with the Thénardiers had been dreamless: for the longest time, she'd thought of that time as the earliest thing she remembered, waking nights and thin, uneven sleep that left her half-awake through clashing days. In her memory, she'd heard voices as through veils.

After she'd left, the dreams had started, quietly at first. Once she'd understood that crying was not forbidden, nights had become louder, and then, once she'd reached the age to understand that just because something was allowed didn't mean it wasn't upsetting, they'd become quieter again.

If Cosette could have chosen to forget, she thought that she would have. As it was, she saw the faces her father thought she'd forgotten every night, and by the time the dreams faded, she'd moved in with a coven and a gardener who taught her how to draw magic like a shield around her.

In the garden, Éponine had looked at her like a deer in headlights. The first moment, the touch of recognition, had faded so fast that Cosette had barely noticed it. It was only later, curled up close in her bed, listening to the fire die, that Cosette had put every last piece together. She'd never spent much time wondering what it'd be like to see any of them again – what, after all, were the odds? – but it had, in the end, only depended on how much had changed.

Éponine had not been the same. Cosette knew two girls: one from childhood, helpless and vicious, and now a frightened thief who seemed perpetually braced to be hurt. There could be no quicker way to lose the trust of the second than to let show that one remembered the first.

The moment she'd let go of her, Éponine had backed away, and disappeared back down the street without another word.

Cosette walked home and felt herself, step by unsure step, settle into the first tentative peace she'd known in months. Back at Rue Plumet, she caught up on what work was to be done. The past few weeks had made her anxious and single-minded, and her garden had suffered the consequences. She pruned and weeded where needed; she earthed up three rows of potatoes and cut enough lavender to dry in time for next week.

Last, she cut peonies for the dining room table, and went inside to talk with her father.

She'd known exactly how it would go. On a few occasions, she'd had experienced her father in a crisis, and she knew what to expect. He'd try very hard not to frighten her with his panic, and she'd be very aware of said panic nonetheless, and they'd both withdraw still unhappy and having said very little.

Cosette had no protocol in place for how to respond when her father, upon hearing how she'd consistently failed to be honest with him, not only for the past month, but for years, lowered his head into his hands and said, lifting it again, “I am so sorry.”

He shook his head against her immediate protest. “I won't hear of you taking any blame for this. With good reason or not, I've become someone to whom you couldn't tell the truth. Don't forgive me for that too easily, Cosette.” He looked miserable. “All of that anxiety to keep you safe, and I've only endangered you.”

“Now, that's just untrue.” Cosette put on her sternest face. “I'm very capable of doing that myself, thank you.” She winced at his tortured expression. “Sorry; wrong time. No, really. Here is what happened: I tried not to hurt you, and you tried not to hurt me. Neither of us did a very good job at it. I always imagined – I thought you'd be happiest thinking I had no memories of that time, but all it did was give you another thing you thought you had to carry by yourself. That didn't occur to me until today.”

“I can carry it.” Her father smiled. He had been looking tired more often lately. “It's the fear of it coming back to hurt you again that's difficult.”

“Well, none of that, then.”

They looked at each other, and then she laughed, quietly, with watering eyes.

“Here's a deal.” She straightened her spine. This was how to speak about such things without bursting into tears: maintain a sense of business, and remember the promise of reward. There was much still to be said, but they'd already admitted to more in the past ten minutes than had been said between them for ten years. “We make an honest effort to stop making ourselves unhappy. Before we decide on our own what is best for the other, we ask.”

When she'd been little, Cosette had seen a look in her father's eyes sometimes, so far-away and haunted that she'd never tried to follow it. The older she'd become, the more she'd understood that he was very rarely fully with her, and that it was the moments in which his eyes were awake and present, without chasing some distant past, that formed the exception.

This was one such look. He clasped her hand. Sixteen years later, hers still felt very small in his.

“You know,” he said softly, “I think that sounds like a very good idea.”

There was always work to do. Cosette returned to it with new vigour, but also with new lightness; a thrilling sort of ambition had come with understanding how much magic out there she had yet to encounter or understand. She returned to her garden, to her market stall that had been, as dozens of customers reassured her, so sorely missed, she returned to Musichetta's comfortable apartment, and she returned to the strings of drying flowers hung up all over her bedroom and to the west-facing window seat where she spent most summer evenings, packing up charms or making fairies.

She was sitting just there, content with her task of tying up bundles of peppermint for the night, when she saw it. October had come quicker than it normally did, and summer was beginning, like every year, to feel like a dream as the leaves fell. Cosette placed the bunch of herbs in her hand down when she heard a noise at the window, and looked out.

Below, a silhouette at the garden gate.

Above, a cloud of starlings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love starlings. They're terrifying. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY) are some murmurations to marvel at.  
> Working on this prompt was quite the journey. Many, many thanks to UnconquerableSoul for leaving it in the first place, for their patience, and for being all-around wonderful. I really hope you enjoyed it. ❤  
> Thank you for reading! I hope you're safe & well. Say hi on [tumblr](https://lesamis.tumblr.com/) if you like.


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